A busy tube train has derailed at Chancery Lane station on the London Underground, reportedly 30 people have injuries needing hospital attention. BBC news coverage is here. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2694361.stm
Saw that on the news last night. At least in the tube, the cars cannot turn over or sideways. All the trains of that type have been withdrawn for safety checks, so the tube will be messed up a bit!
According to our local news reports something fell off from under the train and landed under the wheel of the second last car causing it too derail?
From the most recent news it sounds like it might be a traction motor coming loose. As Alan says, the entire Central line fleet is now out of service for checks, and with the Central line being one of the longest and busiest lines it will cause quite a bit of trouble. The Central line cars are identical to the new Waterloo & City line cars pictured in the W&C thread, as you can see from the pictures, the doors on these cars are externally mounted, which explains some of them being ripped off as the train scraped the tunnel walls! Not a good situation on a busy train (there were reportedly up to 800 people on board!)
There are a few pictures of the train at this link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2696383.stm In the third picture, the dirty area of the bodyshell is normall covered by the end of the door, so doesn't get touched by the washing plants. Current news latest is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2695053.stm
It seems that hundreds of bolts need to be replaced on all the units, which means there could be no services on the affected lines for two weeks!
This incident spawned the usual rash of innacurate, sensationalist, scaremongering claptrap in the newspapers - I'm not for a minute pretending that the accident was not terrifying and that it was quite lucky that more people were not more badly injured but to put it in perspective it was a RELATIVELY minor incident on an amazingly safe system which carries millions and millions of people every year. The next day one paper carried a photo of a supposedly cobbled up repair of a section of track - I am not a civil engineer or an expert in any way but it looked like some sort of packing arrangement under a rail; probably the sort of thing that is done countless times, perfectly safely, during track maintenance - but I suppose the papers have to find ways of selling copies, hence the sensationalism. The two subjects that the press seem perpetually incapable of writing accurately, seriously and objectively about are transport and any kind of music listened to by anyone born after 1950 (i.e. young peoples' music from rock and roll and Chicago blues onwards up to the present day)! Ben
